


Pictures of You

by AstridContraMundum



Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: Actually kind of canon-complaint, Episode: s03e01 Ride, Inspired by two songs by The Cure and a tumblr post, M/M, Mutual Pining, Romance, a bit of magical realism, but with a happy ending?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:42:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27432988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstridContraMundum/pseuds/AstridContraMundum
Summary: It had been years since Morse had last looked at the old reel of film, but sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could still see it—that glimmer of light, as the frames rolled on, one by one.
Relationships: Joss Bixby/Endeavour Morse
Comments: 18
Kudos: 25





	Pictures of You

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a Bixby tumblr post by the fabulous and talented @keysmash!  
> Thank you!

It had been years since Morse had last looked at the old reel of film, but sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could still see it—that glimmer of light, as the frames rolled on, one by one.

Not the flicker of the film, but of the light that lay in Bixby’s eyes—whether it be the childlike triumph as he caught a gold gambling chip flipped high into the air with easy grace, or the spark of delight that gleamed there as he cast his face up, laughing, while a cascade of ghostly white balloons floated down around him.

There had been another sort of light there, too, once. A softer light, full of longing, that shone with a heart-breaking brilliance as they had stood alone in the darkness, at the edge of a dock. A quiet sort of light, as his lips spoke of Kay, but his eyes—his eyes, full of light and of a long loneliness that Morse knew only too well—spoke only of him.

Of all the things that might be.

No.

That could never be.

Could never be, surely, but, then, Bixby smiled and looked at him as if he might hold him within the velvet depths of those eyes forever.

_“One a night like this, a man might believe anything is possible.”_

An invitation to try.

To hope.

Perhaps, even, to love.

Morse might have done it, might have closed the few feet that lay between them with a handful of easy steps. Might have done what they both wanted him to do.

And what then?

It was impossible, it didn’t make sense.

Later, Morse felt just the opposite.

Later, he thought that he had not moved closer, closed that space between them, because he knew it, instinctively, even then. 

It was as if some part of Morse understood that—if he were to draw nearer, close his eyes, seal their mouths together in a kiss, warm and sliding and tinged with the sweetness of Scotch—that he would never in his life be kissed in such a way again.

That he would be left to carry that one moment like a gold gambling chip in his pocket until the end of his days.

And so he stepped back and grinned, trying to break the spell. 

“Good luck,” he said.

Bixby’s smile twitched at the corner of his mouth, a gentle play of the lips full of regret, full of understanding, and of bittersweet resignation.

“You too, old man,” he murmured.

“You, too.”

And Morse turned away, feeling Bixby’s gaze on him almost as a warmth pinned somewhere between his shoulder blades as he walked back across the dock, back to the lake house, back to the place of his exile.

Never knowing that it was a place that he would never quite leave again.

When you live in the shadows long enough, you forget the light.

***

Dr. DeBryn had once told him that, if he wanted to be a detective, he’d have to be prepared to look death in the eye.

But he could never quite manage it, could he?

Not since his mother ..…

And so Morse had always turned away, looked up at the ceiling, or else scrubbed up the waves at the back of his nape, contemplating the shine of his shoes as he stood at the scene of crime, listening as Max reeled off his grim inventory.

But on that night, Morse didn’t hesitate. He threw himself into the lake without thinking, calling out into the night as if something within him was breaking.

_“Bix?”_

_“Bixby?”_

He didn’t even recognize the sound that followed, a desperate, guttural cry that tore through the shadows of the trees around him, right at that moment of terrible victory— the moment when he pulled Bixby’s limp form up to the surface to breathe…

…. only to see that there was no possible way for the man ever to draw breath again.

Morse stood waist-deep in the black lake, holding Bixby’s body, while all the while his own body flooded with a cold that had nothing to do with the icy water that permeated his clothes, his mind a blown candle.

His eyes had been the last, Morse thought wildly, to look into Bixby’s eyes, the last to look into the dark eyes that were no longer there, save for those belonging to the one who had finally extinguished the light in them.

***

At the funeral, Morse kept his collar up against the spring chill, partially obscuring his face, kept his dull blue gaze trained straight ahead.

“Bixby didn’t belong to their world any more than I do,” he told Thursday. “I wanted to tell him that, the last night I saw him.”

But what Morse didn’t say was this:

_“I wanted to tell him… he belonged in mine.”_

Or he might have done, once.

He might have done.

***

Morse returned to police work, returned to Oxford. And in between the opera records and the Scotch and the late nights at Kidlington, Bixby. The shadow of a man grown fainter over the years, but also bigger and brighter and more brilliant than the sun.

Because Bixby lived on—both in Morse’s memory and in the reel of film that he had taken from the great house before he left it for the last time, a film he watched again and again until he knew the flicker of each frame by heart, until it seemed as if each image had been burned onto his retinas, so that he had only to close his eyes to see them shimmering on, stirring to life, a dream life that sometimes seemed more real to him than his waking life, so that he could almost feel it, all that they might have had, if he had been able to close that gap, if he had stayed with him on that fateful night.

If only he had stepped closer, if only he had found the right words, said _something._

Just for once in his life. 

Just for once. 

Eventually, Morse tucked the reel of film away in a drawer under a pile of old jumpers. What need had he to look at it? He had each moment memorized, all of those moments that they had had—would ever have—the threads of their lives having intertwined for only a handful of in-between days….

A couple of parties.

A night under the stars.

A day in the sun when they had stood in Bixby’s fantastic gardens, looking over his fleet of fantastic automobiles, a day that often came back to Morse in whispers, like a tree full of leaves in a summer wind.

_I could use a good corner-man. Why don’t you come and work for me while you make your mind up?_

_Doing what, exactly?_

_Keeping me out of trouble, in the main._

All Bixby had known of him was that he had been up but had failed to take his degree and that he’d recently been released from prison. It seemed incredible to Morse that the man should put so much of his not inconsiderable faith in him.

As Morse had stood there, his hands tucked casually into his pockets but his mind reeling with the question of what he should do next, he had felt something in himself unwinding at Bixby’s words, felt something in his chest glowing, like the warmth of the sun. That feeling of easy camaraderie, of being so effortlessly understood, was a thing that had come only rarely in Morse’s life.

  
_“You’re a straight bat, old man. Knew it as soon as I saw you.”_

Which had seemed to Morse, in that moment, to be the kindest words that anyone had spoken to him for as long as he could remember….

***

By the time Morse made detective inspector, he had long since settled into a house he had bought in Oxford, one with a garden full of the warble of birdsong, and little by little, he grew quietly resigned to the unfolding of his life, even without realizing it. And he was grateful, even content, really, with the scraps of happiness he found along the way, with the affection of those few who seemed to look beyond what everyone made a great show to say was his gruff and forbidding exterior.

What rubbish, really.

People would exaggerate.

And, then, it happened: there came a time when Morse was so caught up in a case that he realized a week had passed in which he had not spared Bixby a passing thought.

A month.

But then, there were other times, times when he woke to an empty bed in the early hours of a cool blue-indigo morning, or, when he sat at his desk, alone, late at night under a circle of yellow lamplight, that it seemed that not one moment had passed in which Bixby had not been there with him, flickering like an image just out of sight, watching over him with that hint of a fond and playful smile, ghosting along at the edges of his memory.

In his worst moments, Morse thought perhaps he had imagined it all, all of what might have lain between them. Bix had been a consummate showman, after all, had always aimed to charm, to impress. The warmth of Bixby’s hand on his shoulder as he had steered him through the opulent party might well have been all a part of the show, a gesture as false as that counterfeit painting he displayed under bright lights, all just a part of whatever game it was they had been playing through those brief and fleeting hours.

_It’s a fake. A copy. The real one hangs in the Rijksmuseum. I’ve seen it._

_How do you know? Maybe this one is the real one, and the one in the Rijksmuseum is a fake._

_How do you know?_

In those moments, the words seemed to echo down to him through time, like a taunt.

_How do you know?_

But no.

The soft light in his eyes, as they had stood alone, at the edge of the dock…

That could not have been feigned.

It was real. It had to have been real. Morse had to believe it, had to think, that, even for a moment, he had had that … someone to look at him in that way. Not just as a valued colleague or as a trusted mentor.

But as someone utterly, even wildly, adored.

If even only for an hour.

***

Strange was standing over him, mouthing words he could not understand. And why should he be looking so worn, so old? It didn’t make any sense.

Damned infuriating, really.

Morse closed his tired eyes against it all, against Strange’s jumbled sentences, against the bright and clinical white lights glaring above him, wishing for nothing but silence, nothing but to rest—but it seemed that the murmur of sound droned on and on, the glimmer of light glowing brighter and then brighter still, bigger and brighter and more brilliant than the sun, turning from white to pure gold, to the liquid, gilt light of a party, making him to feel almost as if he were slipping forwards…

And then…. he really _was_ moving forwards, his limbs so limber that he felt as if he were gliding, full of youth and strength, so much so that, as he passed by an oval mirror, he was not at all surprised by the brightness of his blue eyes reflected there, nor by the fiery shade of his unkempt hair—let alone by the fact that he should suddenly be dressed in an evening suit.

He spun about, suddenly aware of just where he was, and his heart was racing, beating arrhythmically, out of control, even as somewhere above the din of the party he heard a distant shout of voices, calling to him from far away, as if from a far-off country.

It felt as if a pair of hands had closed over him, pressing over his chest, but Morse turned around and hurled himself away, charging off amidst a jostling of shoulders and of elbows akimbo, through the shadows of crowds to the light of the winding stair, where Bixby had been wont to stand, overlooking his party in the the way in which a prince oversees his kingdom.

At last, Morse made his way into the grand foyer, and, sure enough, there was Bixby, standing on the sixth or seventh step, with a look of keen expectancy on his face. It was as if he had always stood there, as if he had been waiting there all along, right where Morse had left him, his dark eyes bright with that same old eternal glow of wonder, the light that Morse had once known so well.

Bixby looked down at him, then, and smiled his familiar, playful quirk of a smile.

“Now there’s a turn up,” he said. “Back for seconds, Inspector Morse?”

Morse drew to a halt, his breath catching high in his throat. Now that the moment was finally here, he felt thrown off-balance somehow—not so much by the incongruity of being called by such a name, a name that Bixby had never known him by—but by a bright and dazzling epiphany, a growing awareness that this was _it,_ his second chance, the one he had been hoping for all along without ever quite allowing himself to realize it. 

_If you live in the shadows long enough, you forget the light._

But, even as he stood before him, his mind whirling with the play of revolving party lights, dizzy on that spinning edge, the moment was passing, he was missing it, he was making the same mistake twice, fated perhaps _always_ to make it, again and again, doomed by his own restrained and cautious nature, this was as close as he got.

Morse should have been stepping forward, closing the aching distance between them, but instead, it was as if he was frozen, his feet heavy, rooted to the spot.

But it was all right. It was fine, really. Because Bixby was laughing, just as if he understood. And he _did_ understand, he had always understood, just as if they had been two halves of the same lonely whole. He must have understood, because, then, Bixby was walking down to him, reaching out so that his hand landed firmly on his shoulder, warm and solid, radiating with a heat like the light of the sun, so that, until that very moment, Morse hadn’t realized how very cold he had become.

And why was he so cold?

Morse thought that Bixby might wrap his arm around him as he once had done, steer him through the party, guiding him through this brave new world of sound and color and light, but, instead, he was pulling him in, drawing him closer and closer.

And even now, here where he had most wanted to be, looking into eyes full of longing, full of love, Morse’s mind was full of doubt, as if there was something inside him unable to believe in his own happiness.

“Is this real?” Morse asked, at last. “You can’t tell me you’ve been waiting right here, all of this time, all along.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Bixby replied. “If you lost someone you loved and had the chance to make it right?”

“You can’t turn back the clock,” Morse protested.

But Bixby shook his head.

“Of course you can, old man. Of course, you can.”

He smiled, then, mischievously. 

“As the fella said. You only get one go around the board.”

Morse widened his eyes in surprise, and Bixby laughed, delighted, it seemed, by the dumbfounded expression on his face. Morse struggled to come up with some apt reply, but before he could even begin to absorb the irony of the words once said long ago, in another life, Bixby was leaning down and tilting his face, and Morse’s heart sped up again in anticipation of the moment, the moment he had so many times imagined, as Bixby pressed their mouths together in a kiss.

At once, Morse felt his knees go as soft as the tremble of water beneath him, as the warmth that moved against his mouth flooded through him, seeking and searching, so that he almost felt as if he was quivering with it, with some golden light.

Morse reached up and ran his fingers through Bixby’s hair, something he had never been bold enough to do the first time they had met, and he _couldn’t_ be imagining it, because how could he dream of a sensation he did not know?

_How do you know?_

And he did know, it _was_ real, because there was no real magic, only love, and Morse found himself stirring to life. He leaned forward with a fresh, new eagerness, let the last traces of tension in his jaw soften, let his mouth fall open, granting Bixby better access and losing himself to the slow slide of his mouth on his, losing himself to the kiss.

But even as Morse’s thoughts flickered, as effervescent as the flicker of film, or as sunlight dancing on the surface of Lake Silence, in one corner of his mind, a scrap of solid memory came to him: the memory of how he had once feared that, if he and Bixby ever were to kiss, that never in his life would he be kissed in such a way again.

And of how that would have been true. 

But now, as Morse stood here at the bottom of the stairs, pressing in closer and closer, Bixby’s hand slipping from his shoulder to the small of his back, drawing him in so that they stood like twin beams of light intertwining—now that it was finally happening, he felt just the opposite...

Now, as he stood within that long-awaited embrace, he thought not on what could never be, or of what might have been, but of all that was to come.


End file.
